Posts Tagged 'Fears'

As a member of the illustrious the SoftLayer sales (SLales) team, I have the daily pleasure of talking with any number of potential, prospective, new and current customers, and in many of those conversations, I've picked up on a fairly common theme: FEAR. Now we're not talking about lachanophobia (fear of vegetables) or nomophobia (fear of losing cell phone contact) here ... We're talking about fear that paralyzes users and holds them captive — effectively preventing their growth and limiting their business's potential. Fear is a disease.

I've created my own little naming convention for the top three most common phobias I hear from users as they consider making changes to their hosting environments:

1. Pessimisobia
This phobia is best summarized by the saying, "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't." Users with this phobia could suffer from frequent downtime, a lack of responsive support and long term commitment contracts, but their service is a known quantity. What if a different provider is even worse? If you don't suffer from pessimisobia, this phobia probably seems silly, but it's very evident in many of the conversations I have.

2. Whizkiditus
This affliction is particularly prevalent in established companies. Symptoms of this phobia include recurring discomfort associated with the thought of learning a new management system or deviating from a platform where users have become experts. There's an efficiency to being comfortable with how a particular platform works, but the ceiling to that efficiency is the platform itself. Users with whizkiditus might not admit it, but the biggest reason they shy away from change is that they are afraid of losing the familiarity they've built with their old systems over the years ... even if that means staying on a platform that prohibits scale and growth.

3. Everythingluenza
In order to illustrate this phobia of compartmentalizing projects to phase in changes, let's look at a little scenario:

I host all of my applications at Company 1. I want to move Application A to the more-qualified Company 2, but if I do that, I'll have to move Applications B through Z to Company 2 also. All of that work would be too time-consuming and cumbersome, so I won't change anything.

It's easy to get overwhelmed when considering a change of cloud hosting for any piece of your business, and it's even more intimidating when you feel like it has to be an "all or nothing" decision.

Unless you are afflicted with euphobia (the fear of hearing good news), you'll be happy to hear that these common fears, once properly diagnosed, are quickly and easily curable on the SoftLayer platform. There are no known side effects from treatment, and patients experience immediate symptom relief with a full recovery in between 1-3 months.

This might be a lighthearted look at some quirky fears, but I don't want to downplay how significant these phobias are to the developers and entrepreneurs that suffer from them. If any of these fears strike a chord with you, reach out to the SLales team (by phone, chat or email), and we'll help you create a treatment plan. Once you address and conquer these fears, you can devote all of your energy back to getting over your selenophobia (fear of the moon).